


It Finds You

by alicekittridge



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: A teaspoon of angst, F/F, Mild Sexual Content, POV Second Person, Present Tense, Two whole cups of happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:26:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28105458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alicekittridge/pseuds/alicekittridge
Summary: In which Jamie cultivates a moonflower in secret.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 9
Kudos: 65





	It Finds You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClomWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClomWrites/gifts).



> This is my take on what leads Jamie to confess to being in love with Dani in episode 9. It's been a while since I've written something canon-related, and since we all could use a bit of happiness right now, that's what this (mostly) is. Barely edited, so I apologize in advance for any mistakes.
> 
> \--  
> Rating is a mild M.  
> Title is from Beach House's song "Real Love." I've also borrowed some dialogue from Episode 9. 
> 
> Happy holidays to you all, and thank you, as always, for reading xx

**Y** ou don’t know what spurs you to do it. You could chalk it down to a change in weather—summer, with heat that gets less than pleasant as the long days grow into weeks, accompanied by looser clothing to allow at least some air to pass through while sunlight beats heavily down from a humid sky—but it isn’t necessarily that. Not even a change in scenery, a different act from a year ago, a happier one. Though you can’t deny both these things have sunlight in them, in such a physical sense. She is someone that lives with you and floats beside you, someone that has been drawing lingering looks throughout the most ordinary of days while your heart constricts your chest in a feeling you’re certain you’re finding the name for. Perhaps it’s that, you think, sneaking away from the quiet noise of the shop and Dani’s hushed conversation with a customer searching for appropriate funeral flowers, disappearing into the even quieter back room and searching through a cabinet you haven’t touched in a year. There’s a bag of seeds sitting in the darkness, lying dormant in wait, having travelled with you all the way from England. Three of them, to be exact. You curl them into your fist and put them back, promising to return, and come back to Dani, alone now, filling out an order sheet in a careful hand, looking rather somber.

“All right?” you ask.

The breath she inhales is heavy, slightly shaky. “It’s not easy,” she says softly, “being reminded of death.” One last line, and the form is ready. She takes it from the clipboard and files it into the _outgoing_ box.

“Death’s a part of life. Simple fact, but always hard to accept.” She leans into your touch when it lands gently on her shoulder. “You head on home, Poppins,” you tell her gently. “I’ll wrap up here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Relief turns her posture limber. Dani kisses you in thanks, a little kiss, and tells you she’ll see you soon.

You don’t stay long after closing, not wanting Dani to be alone for too long. You stay long enough to get the three little seeds situated in their pots, buried underneath fertile soil, placed in a small part of the shop whose temperature is kept colder. It’s a room Dani doesn’t often go in. Not fond of cold, that one. A good place to cultivate a secret.

“G’night wee ones,” you tell them.

Home smells like Thai. There’s a restaurant a few blocks down where the owner, Mrs. Photsi, knows Dani by name and always sneaks a small discount because Dani had done the same six months before, when the kind woman’s son passed from leukaemia and she’d come in looking for hydrangeas to plant in his garden. It’s Dani’s comfort food. Always the same thing: pad thai, medium spice, light on the peanuts, three boxes of potstickers with extra sauce, green tea. You find her on the parlor floor, dinner spread out, half her pad thai and potstickers waiting on a plate for you, accompanied by a glass of red wine. Jazz floats from the record player in your bedroom, slow and soft. Her hair is down, gloriously blonde, stark against the red of her shirt. Instead of changing, as you normally might, you sink beside her, taking up fork and plate.

“Didn’t feel like cooking,” Dani says.

“‘S alright. I was cravin’ Thai anyway. Didn’t think my thoughts were that loud.”

A smile. Small, but there, emerging around a potsticker speared through with her fork. It disappears. Whatever’s on her mind clearly wants to come out; there’s a crease between her brows and an occupied glint in her eyes, but the words have to form. She has to breathe first.

Then, “That’s the hard part of this job. Seeing people like her today.” A pause. More breathing. “Death is an event, for the family and friends that were closest. For others it’s just… an occasion. Something you bring flowers to and sympathies and thoughts but nothing else. Unaware that it’s adding weight to the shoulders. It’s hard, Jamie, because… people like her remind you time is hanging over us and we can’t see it but someone,” she points to the sky and gestures around you, “can. It reminds you that some of it is borrowed.”

Monologues like these clove your heart to pieces. There’s something inside her, this dark thing you don’t understand, that lurks and ebbs, something you can’t touch but can help stave. You say, carefully, “The thing about time, Poppins, is we can be selfish with it. Keep some for us. We can choose where to put it and when to give it back. Not all of it, maybe, but… most of it.” You find her hand. She holds yours tightly. Brings it up to her mouth and presses a kiss to your knuckles, lips sticky with sweet and sour sauce. “You’re still here. Still you. Seems like we’ve got plenty of time to be selfish with, if you ask me.”

The look on her face is nearly identical to the one she’d worn when her first “I love you” slipped from her mouth, though without the quick fall of guilt following swiftly afterward. It is silent, it is strong, and full of appreciation. You cup her face and kiss her, keeping it short.

You finish dinner. You wash up the dishes and stack up the leftovers in the fridge. Dani hugs you from behind at the kitchen sink, sighing deeply, the warm weight of her a comfort. You’d never had arms that felt like home until she’d stumbled into your life. You lean your head against hers. Ask, “Anything I can do?”

“Mm-hmm,” she murmurs, detaching herself. You turn around and she’s undoing the buttons on her short-sleeve shirt.

“Oh yeah?”

The clouds have passed, as they do. Blue sky emerges. You pin her to the counter opposite, lips travelling the soft expanse of her chest, taking your time, tracing her nipples with gentle strokes of tongue, then the spot just above her left hip that never fails to make her giggle.

You take her against the counter, knees protesting against the hardwood floor, elated at the hands anchored in your hair.

You are worth it, you want this to say. I want my time dedicated to you. Every minute. Doesn’t matter what they’re filled with.

“You’re not sick of me?” Dani asks afterwards, face buried against your neck.

You shake your head. Pull her tighter against you. “Not a damn bit.”

—

The moonflowers emerge at different rates. It takes weeks of patience and frustrated waiting. Bloody hard to grow in England, you’d once told Dani, and while gently uncovering the roots of flower number two, you amend the statement. Bloody fucking hard to grow in Vermont. Number one had died not long after its emergence. Something with the roots. Number two is looking less healthy, but it seems salvageable. Number three is barely a bud, the little runt. You’ll keep an eye on it, you tell it, tucking it away again before Dani has time to wonder where you’ve gone off to.

You’ve concocted several fibs as to what’s keeping you so late, preparing them in case Dani comes asking, but being the person she is, she thinks it’s another space of yours. Something entirely your own, a room into which she needs an invitation—much like your flat above the pub. She’d been curious to see it, had even suggested it, but hadn’t gone in until you gave her permission. You both know that, despite all the things you do together, there are still things you do alone. Couples are not one sole entity.

“Like buddy plants,” Dani had said, not long after The Leafling opened and curious eyes came wandering in. “Growing in a bed together but still their own plant.”

You made a joke about onions and garlic. She returned with one about tomatoes and basil.

More weeks pass. The days grow more humid. Moonflower number two dies. Roots again, you sigh, scooping the thing from its pot and putting its corpse and soil into the back room’s bin. You come home tired and a little disappointed, Dani assuming it’s the stress of the onslaught of wedding anniversaries that’ve filled half the orders this month. She rubs your shoulders while you eat her homemade ravioli, thumbs digging into the delicate area at the base of your neck, an altogether different heat building with each stroke, at the closeness of Dani’s warmth.

“If I remember right,” she whispers against your ear, “it’s a sort of anniversary for us.”

“Yeah?”

“Our first kiss,” she says. “Happened in August.”

You smile. “Sap.” You turn into her, pressing a clumsy kiss to the corner of her mouth, not at all surprised at her remembrance of such a thing. “You were the one who called it wrong.”

“It started off wrong, sure,” Dani says, climbing into your lap, “but it felt right.”

Your heart does another leap inside your chest.

—

You come into the back room at the end of a hectic day and find moonflower number three thriving. You’d moved it last week from the colder room to this one, since it’s kept at a comfy 70 Fahrenheit, and now it sits on the windowsill, not yet open, but just about ready to be. The stem is a lovely green. The petals are white as milky moonlight. And all the while, staring at it, you’re aware that the feeling in your chest finally has a name.

Behind you, in the sunlit shop, Dani putters, experimenting with an arrangement. Her back to you, completely in her own world, it’s safe to emerge and hide the flower briefly on a shelf underneath the register until after you’ve flipped the sign to _closed_ and brought an outdoor plant inside _._ Moths flutter in your stomach and chest, different ones than you’ve known before, and when you tell Dani, “Have somethin’ for you,” you hope they don’t come flying out.

“Oh yeah?” she says, still distracted by tulips.

You put the moonflower into view. “Yeah.”

Dani pauses, face turning into a small mask of puzzlement. “Is that a moonflower?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re really rare, you know.”

And it isn’t moths that come from your mouth, but a half-shaky confession. “I’ve got a problem,” you say. “Or rather, _we’ve_ got a problem, Poppins.”

“Oh no,” she says.

“You see, I’m not sick of you. At all.” And now the hard part. “I’m actually pretty in love with you, it turns out.”

The smile that lights her face is one of knowing. Like she’s known you’ve been in love for a good long while. But it’s also complete and utter happiness. To know that you feel the same way. That you are consumed and overwhelmed with a tidal wave of tenderness like she is. Equal ground.

She leans and kisses you. If it can be considered a kiss, with your lips hardly touching because the smiles are impossible to wash off. She glances over her shoulder before giving you another, deeper one, and, satisfied that there are no witnesses, lets you lead her to the back room.

The dance resumes on the cramped, spinach green sofa, elation filling you to the brim. You can’t get enough of each other. Dani only pulls away to ask, amid shorter breaths, “How long were you growing it?”

“‘Bout a month,” you admit, feeling your face turn a little redder. “Damn thing was a lot bloody harder to grow here than in England.”

She kisses your forehead. “It’s beautiful.” The kisses afterward are lingering, hungry things, Dani’s hands scrambling to untuck your shirts from your pants and fingers clumsily undoing their button. Meanwhile yours open her collared shirt, pink as the tulips she was experimenting with in the arrangement a handful of minutes earlier, bringing out the brighter blonde strands in her hair. You stroke the exposed curves of her shoulders, knowing without leaning in that, there, she smells of salt and lavender soap.

“I really am, you know,” you say, making her pause. “Mad for you. Think I was not long after we met.”

She smiles. “Hmm. Is that what you were talking about at the table the day I made the kids do your gardening?”

A laugh escapes your lips. “Nah. I was blabbin’ on about how you were too pretty.”

“Too pretty?” Dani says. She makes herself look smug. “My, my.”

You take her face between your hands, sighing, “Just kiss me some more, you damn moosher.”

She does. And accompanies them with a hand sliding between the parted sides of your pants. You keen into her, wrapping her in your arms to pull her impossibly closer against you, opening your knees as much as the sofa will allow, inviting her in to take as much of you as she wants. It’s gentle and slower this time, nothing desperate, just syrupy passion. The orgasm is intense, despite this, and as her lips pepper your cheeks and your neck while she guides you through it, you think the definition of forever is here in Dani Clayton’s arms.


End file.
